In his report, Andrea Mengucci said he encountered tons of Hurkyl's, Fiery Confluence, etc, and that people were just prepared to beat Shops. Assuming he's right, the approach paid off, as we had an entirely non-Shops top 8. Was this a fluke, or can we expect people to take this approach and succeed at the upcoming NA Vintage events?

@Stuart He was true when saying that people were ready for the shop matchup. Some people were even paranoid about it : i met a BUG deck that was running (post side) : 4 trygon predator, 4 nature's claim and 3 energy flux. Obviously i lost ...
Shop is sort of similar to dredge : when you take it seriously, you win against it.

@log I agree with you even though I had my say listening to you talk to PeAcH about Shops. I also expected a way higher number of Shops, mostly because I expected players from Germany to come and play (and there's a lot of Shops players there). Unfortunately they didn't come, similarly as others from France and vicinity due to mostly the reputation of BoM organizer (and whatnot).

I expected also Henrik, Niels and Simon to be on Shops and they play well. The problem wit up to date lists may also be because people don't want to play up-to-date Shops lists. I have Shops usually around and the version I was able to play was one that was acting more like a prison rather than aggro. Casting little creatures and attacking with them doesn't really appeal to me and I'd also wish to find something to interest me and I think this was the approach of many players there. I was playing somewhere at the lower tables (I don't want to offend anybody) but what I've seen there I could hardly call Vintage. There were so many weird things happening there, and also there were Shops around...'the theoretically easy deck to play'. The up-to-date lists are also something I'm not used to (it showed when I played with it).

It's true that the Vintage in Europe often looks like it got stuck in time and many players are a bit behind what is going on Magic Online or on the other side of the globe. At events here I often felt that I played with the same cards as online but the games were often totally different...One of the reasons may also be the fact that we have/had sanctioned Vintage events here mostly. This may be a reason why some players don't change decks, don't experiment and don't adapt.

Our local community started to follow a bit after I came and crushed their reality of what is Vintage. Some of the players felt that badly that they started wondering what's wrong and well it made them actually adapt a bit. In general....the consensus here is to play Vintage for fun. Most of the players were never good players in the first time, but they have access to Vintage cards so they can play Vintage. So when someone like me came there and beat them they felt that I'm from a different world and destroying something of theirs.

We should be glad that we can play paper Vintage even if Eternal Weekend/its organization was a big disappointment.

@stuart Agreed! Canali definitely had the best brew from the weekend. He mentioned that the deck needed one more win-con besides Mentor though and was considering either Tinker/Blightsteel or Time Vault, as he ended up in the draw bracket due to long games.

@stsung I mostly agree on what you said, it's usually one or more of those reasons, depending on the specific group of players and also the few chances of playing Vintage just generate a loop (few tournaments- > few "prepared" players -> low attendance/competition -> fewer tournaments etc.)

The Danish guys are just sort of a proof of that: Thiim came 9th with Traxos (that'd be the Shops specialist on a close-to-stock list) and Henrik made top 8 with something that looks close to unplayable (Eldrazi + actual Spheres?! that'd be the veteran player on a questionable deck.

Here we have also another kind of player, those that used to be REALLY good back in the days and just are not up to date anymore, but it's hard to show them without having them play on MODO or in the US. They're just so much better equipped than the average Vintage player that they can show up with anything and being a contender, especially on stuff that punishes the unprepared like Standstill, Remora, etc.